|
Arc Newsletter 27 January 2021
|
|
|
|
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY
27 January 2021
Prayer
earth,
let me know once more
the scent of your grass
and the rushing of trees
in your forests, –
let me swim once more
to the light-filled banks.
let the still grey bark of your pines
be my friend again.
for now it all is drowning
in blood-filled fog.
the leaves scream,
and the sun pierces.
earth,
let me know once more
the scent of your grass.
Rajzel Zychlinski
Translated from the Yiddish by Jean Boase-Beier
from Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology
|
|
|
To mark Holocaust Memorial Day this year, we’re highlighting a number of our titles by poets whose writing has been shaped by the Holocaust.
|
|
|
|
This anthology aims to give a fuller picture than do most Holocaust anthologies of the poetry that arose from the Holocaust. Here there are poems from languages that are less often associated with the Holocaust (such as Norwegian or Japanese), and there are poems by, or about, those victimised for perceived disabilities, or because they were gay, or because their political or religious beliefs made them targets of Nazi hatred.
|
|
|
To hear the editors Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght reading from the anthology, click here
|
|
|
|
‘There were two ways to respond to that unbearable reality’ wrote Rose Ausländer thirty years later, remembering the Czernowitz ghetto under the Nazis. ‘Either one could despair entirely, or one could occupy a different, spiritual reality […] while we waited for death, there were those of us who dwelt in dreamwords – our traumatic home amidst our homelessness. To write was to live.’
|
|
|
Volke von Törne was born in 1934, the son of a unit commander in the SS. Today, he is remembered internationally for his work as a Director of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), an organisation founded in 1958 with an admission of German guilt for the war and the Holocaust and a pledge to make reparation. Von Törne’s poignant poetry is a powerful and moving articulation of the psychological burden still carried by countless people today through no fault of their own.
|
|
‘Rożewicz is a poet of chaos with a nostalgia for order. Around him and in himself he sees only broken fragments, a senseless rush… his world is situated between the holocaust of the last war and the threat of future annihilation.’ Czeslaw Milosz
‘I am haunted by the vision of history and politics which I draw from Rożewicz.’
Tom Paulin
|
|
|
‘From these splinters, flowers bloom: where the dead lie, trees grow and we must walk among them. In these poems, Esther Dischereit, whose mother was one of the few who survived the Holocaust in hiding within Nazi Germany, lays the present over the past with piercing effect.’ Preti Taneja
|
|
SPECIAL OFFER: 25% off all the above titles
for ONE WEEK ONLY (until 3 February 2021)
|
|
|
|
Finally, to hear poems by Rose Ausländer, Ed Hoornik, Dagmar Hilarová, Catherine Roux, Werner Dürrson, Ida Gerhardt and Angela Fritzen from the anthology Poetry of the Holocaust, read by its editors Jean Boase-Beier and Marian de Vooght, click here.
|
|
|
|
|
|
